Plan S protest Open Letter signed by hundreds of scientists

A new Open Letter against Plan S appeared on the internet. Presently over 600 scientists are protesting against what they see as a bit totalitarian Open Access initiative by Robert-Jan Smits and his partners from Science Europe. Among the Open Letter signatories are many early career researchers and tenured academics, including two Nobelists.

A new Open Letter against Plan S appeared on the internet. Presently over 600 scientists are protesting against what they see as a bit totalitarian Open Access (OA) initiative by the EU special envoy Robert-Jan Smits and his partners from the funder lobby organisation Science Europe, set to restrict “authors’s freedom of publication”. Among the Open Letter signatories are many early career researchers (PhD students and postdocs), but also numerous elite scientists and top academic executives, including Nobelists Ben Feringa and Arieh Warshel. At present stage, the highest share of signatures comes from Sweden, Netherlands, Spain and Israel. They declare:

“The views of researchers who will be directly affected by Plan S do not seem to have been solicited during its creation, and hundreds of them from around the world have now signed an open letter expressing their concern about its ramifications — not only for their own rights as authors and academics, but for the health of scholarly and scientific discourse worldwide”.

Among the signatories are Lynn Kamerlin and several of her chemistry colleagues who penned an earlier Appeal letter which was originally published on my site shortly after Plan S was announced. That led Smits and Science Europe President Marc Schiltz to invite the authors to a videoconference in October, the contents of which I leaked. We learned that Smits sees scholarly societies as part of the problem rather than part of solution on his roadmap to OA. Soon after, Smits doubled down and declared that the taxpayer should only pay societies for publishing papers, and apparently never subsidise their other activities like student fellowships, educational outreach or scientific conferences.

Robert Jan Smits, with typical candour, came out strongly stating in Plan S discuusion meeting @_knaw that paying for publishing services is OK, but the public purse should not finance other activities of scholarly societies. #knawplans

Other big news arrived when two large charity funders, the Wellcome Trust from UK and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation from US, announced to join the cOAlitionS in implementing support for Plan S. Yet here, small print matters: these two funders do not follow the central tenet of Plan S which outright forbids researchers the publishing in non-compliant journals, and seeks to punish them for even trying. Instead, Wellcome Trust and Gates Foundation will not cover article processing charges (APCs) for hybrid journals anymore. Scientists are free to pay the extra OA option from other sources, or negotiate with the journal a CC-BY licence would allow institutional deposition under Green OA. Maybe Plan S is not set in stone after all, as Smits sees it. Maybe it will become a pick-and-mix template. Or maybe another Plan will be designed, where actual scientists get a say, instead of commercial OA publishers.

The present Open Letter against Plan S is highly remarkable also in the sense that while here hundreds of academics put their signed criticism in the open, the unconditional support of Plan S came only from some faceless institutions and a handful of known OA activists. Some of these OA Party cadres tried to top each other in fundamentalism: preprints were denounced as bad or useless, green OA considered as a shameful escape route to be cut off, and predatory OA publishers defended from incompetent insults from scientists.

Why/when deserves something (please discern between paper, journal, publisher, publishing model) to be qualified as junk? I welcome a critical approach, but generalizing over millions of papers is somewhat problematic and also unfair to many colleagues, editors and others,

That was because the comrades remembered that there is no need to collect any support signatures, because Plan S is already supported by the masses, and even has been already in the past history. Seriously. Following the ideological contortion by Schiltz that Plan S is actually the implementation of the Berlin OA Declaration from 2003 and as thus retroactively supported by those same 600 institutions, all 17,000 human signatories of anti-Elsevier protest initiative “The Cost of Knowledge” from 2012 were retroactively delegated to supporting Plan S in 2018. While every scientist who accepts funding from a cOAlitionS member institution automatically lets the spirit Plan S into his or her heart.

5/6 And Plan S simply states that publication should be under a license that conforms to the Berlin Decoaration. Nothing more, nothing less. The Berlin Declaration was crafted by academics and has been endorsed by 600+ academic institutions.

You can if you want… but I don’t want to binarize this into those for, those “against” (although i acknowledge there is nuance in concerns raised so far) and those undecided and unknowing. The for camp are substantially winning imo with 17,000+ over at the @costofknowledge

It was also determined that all European early career researchers support Plan S. This is evidenced by the fact that their representing organisation Eurodoc issued a position statement endorsing Plan S unconditionally. The President of Eurodoc, Gareth O’Neill, ignored all my requests to disclose how many physical members his Eurodoc actually has, besides himself. I eventually learned there are 35 more.

@Eurodoc is a federation of 29 national associations in 28 Countries. Our members elect board and administration (which this year counts 36 individuals) every year at a General Assembly. More information in our website: https://t.co/O3TJY3lfSX

Of course, what can motivate the working academic masses better than a patriotic song? Soon enough, a suitable text was provided (however, by possibly not a fully vetted element), to be sung to an old DDR tune:

The heated debate on whether Plan S is just great or rather a stroke of genius even raised the question if chemistry, the subject where Kamerlin and several of her supporters come from, is actually a failed science and should be dealt with accordingly.

The fact that you as a discipline have failed to see how unethical your behavior is, is exactly why politicians are creating new rules to stop you. You shouldn't push back. You should change your ways.

But now here is the Open Letter. And before Smits goes ballistic again: I had absolutely nothing to do with it. Below, I am merely quoting it.

The Open Letter was originally published on this specially created website, with an official version at Zenodo, an EU-funded scholarly publishing platform. Let’s hope it doesn’t get retracted there as Plan S-non-compliant.

Reaction of Researchers to Plan S; Too far, too risky?

An Open Letter from Researchers to European Funding Agencies, Academies, Universities, Research Institutions, and Decision Makers

We support open access (OA) and Plan S is probably written with good intentions. However, Plan S[1], as currently presented by the EU (and several national funding agencies) goes too far, is unfair for the scientists involved and is too risky for science in general. Plan S has far-reaching consequences, takes insufficient care of the desires and wishes of the individual scientists and creates a range of unworkable and undesirable situations:

(1) The complete ban on hybrid (society) journals of high quality is a big problem, especially for chemistry. Apart from the fact that we won’t be allowed to publish in these journals anymore, the direct effect of Plan S and the way in which some national funding agencies and academic/research institutions seem to want to manage costs may eventually even lead to a situation where we won’t even be able to legally read the most important (society) journals of for example the ACS, RSC and ChemPubSoc anymore. Note that in their announcement of Plan S, the Dutch funding organisation NWO (for example) wrote that they expect to cover the high article processing charges (APCs) associated with the desired Gold OA publishing model from money freed by disappearing or stopped subscriptions to existing journals[2]. As such, Plan S may (eventually) forbid scientists access to (and publishing in) >85% of the existing and highly valued (society) journals! So effectively Plan S would block access to exactly those journals that work with a valuable and rigorous peer-review system of high quality. As a second note on this aspect: In the Netherlands, already for more than 6 months, researchers don’t have legal access to most RSC journals[3]. Fully banning even more society journals is completely unacceptable and unworkable.

(2) We expect that a large part of the world will not (fully) tie in with Plan S. The USA, China and the rest of Asia highly value the existing (society) journals, in particular (for chemistry) the ACS journals and (for physics) the APS journals. Germany and Switzerland already indicated they will not conform to the plans as currently formulated. Belgium will also not join-in and independently introduced a different OA policy. Spain is also out, at least for the time being. A transition period for the rest of the world will surely take a long time, and a total global ban on hybrid (society) journals being taken up as a global initiative seems very improbable. Therefore, Plan S has the risk of splitting the global scientific community into two separate systems: cOAlition S grantees vs. the rest of the world, with all associated negative consequences. If that happens, this will have a strong negative effect on collaborations between the cOAlition S countries and the rest of the world, because joint publications in the highest quality selective journals, based on rigorous peer review and quality control procedures, with the highest standing in the community, won’t be possible anymore (e.g. JACS, Science, Nature, Nature Chemistry, ACS Catalysis and Angewandte Chemie are all forbidden under Plan S!). This will also have a strong negative impact on the internationalization of PhD students and postdocs. Why would someone with academic ambitions come to e.g. the Netherlands or Sweden to obtain a PhD or obtain postdoc experience if they are not allowed to publish in journals that are important for their career progression, on the international landscape, and would make them therefore uncompetitive if they want to leave cOAlition S countries? Students in our universities are already starting to wonder if it is wise to do a PhD in a cOAlition S country, or rather move to another country to increase their chances of a successful (academic) career. Furthermore, if Plan S succeeds in splitting the global research system, it puts the willingness of scientists to do something for anyone in ‘the other system’, such as acting as a peer reviewer for manuscripts and research proposals, under pressure. These are all highly undesirable developments that will hurt science as a whole.

(3) We fully appreciate and agree with ongoing concerns about the exploding costs of journal subscriptions. However, with its strong focus on the Gold OA publication model, in which researchers pay high APCs for each publication, the total costs of scholarly dissemination will likely rise instead of reduce under Plan S. Furthermore, it will not eliminate the so-called publication ‘paywall’, but rather simply shifts it from reading to publishing. Tying in with this, the strong focus of Plan S to support in particular for-profit Gold OA-journals (at the expense of high quality non-profit Society journals[4]) has a serious risk that it leads to a surplus of papers of low quality/originality/newsworthiness and that research groups are confronted with high APCs. After all, this system is coupled to perverse financial incentives: Stimulate accepting as many papers as possible – regardless of their quality – and keep increasing the already high APCs in more selective journals.

(4) Plan S ignores the existence of large differences between different research fields. Plan S has (probably) a much larger negative effect on chemistry than on some other fields. A one-size-fits-all approach, as presented in Plan S, is therefore a bad idea. The ‘mountain of feathers’ effect that Plan S can trigger will likely quickly result in lower international ranking and standing of individual cOAlition S researchers, most certainly if little changes elsewhere.

Taken together, Plan S is a serious violation of academic freedom: Strongly reduced access to (and possibilities to publish in) suitable scientific journals of high quality, with a direct consequence that it also strongly restricts our choice of countries with which we can conveniently collaborate with or sustain lasting exchange programs. There are also issues with the copyright model (CC-BY) demanded by Plan S. A full ban on publishing in hybrid journals with imposed sanctions also feels as a serious degradation of existing rights. Most problematically, less radical and cheaper solutions are certainly possible. See for example the suggestions presented here: [5]. In addition, more and more journals (for example, JACS[6] and Elsevier journals[7]) are allowing researchers to not only deposit preprints of their work but also updating with each round of peer review until the decision letter is issued such that the research becomes immediately available via the pre-print server. However, as currently framed, Plan S sees such modes of dissemination as only being of archival value and this type of Green OA publishing is non-compliant under the current 10 rules of Plan S.

Researchers should have the freedom to choose publication venue, and while complying with Open Access mandates to also choose how papers are made Open Access, in a way that contributes to minimal increased costs for the publishing system while not impinging on academic freedom or jeopardizing internationalization in research and higher education. We call on both funding agencies who are already part of cOAlition S and those who have not (yet?) signed up, to take into account the full landscape of ways that papers can be made Open Access, and not just the very narrow definition provided by Plan S (including the hybrid ban, and the fact that peer reviewed pre-prints such as allowed by the ACS are currently not an obvious compliant solution). In addition, we demand that cOAlition S signatories take responsibility for the implications and risks Plan S may have for the European research landscape, and to therefore take every possible action in the implementation stage to prevent these potential and unintended consequences.

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30 comments on “Plan S protest Open Letter signed by hundreds of scientists”

Eurodoc maintain that they represent every single PhD student and postdoc in 29 European countries with their Plan S support. It is another question how many of these thousands of young researchers know of Eurodoc’s existence. Or even Plan S, for that matter.

36 individuals are in the administration of Eurodoc + 2 delegates for each Countries that represents the members of 29 National Associations which counts their own members. Read carefully, please. All information are in our website.

Also: We travel further in time to find retroactive support for Plan S!
The PLOS declaration was signed in 2000 by 34,000 people, which to some means they all can be summarily relabelled as Plan S signatories in 2018.

600 scientists are protesting against Plan B. Tens of thousands signed the original Public Library of Science open access petition. Not sure all those signatures actually mean very much.

This is getting nasty. Former Springer executive Jan Veltenrop released this callous attack on investigative journalism, it was “liked” by former COPE Chair Virginia Barbour. Almost every day we hear of journalists being murdered for their reporting.

The comforting thing for journalists/observers is of course that they don’t have to come up with alternatives or practical proposals to improve affairs. The best sailors are always on shore, is the expression, especially those who have never tasted the salt of the sea. It’s life.

I think the way to go is simple publication transparency i.e. make original data available as well as make peer review public
I think this should be the real bet and not any other strange plans
Whatever the different journals and/or meetings decide to charge this will up to them and to the rules of commercial competition

Competition can be fair and honest and in the end everybody wins at least a bit with this without that big well supported cheaters pick up all the funding leaving other honest and good scientists without resources and hindering the progression of science

Plan S or X or Y or whatever…..you guys never include people from Business, Economics, Management, Humanities, Social Sciences. Does anyone care about implications to their work? Nope! Nobody asks. No wonder these kind of “initiatives” aren’t widely supported, either Plan S or its protest letter.

I think what is in question here is the current system which:
1. For someone to get a PI job requires publications in the so called high impact journals
2. Additionally the system requires that a PI to get grants publishs as well in the so called high impact journals
3. Amazing research results do not exist and funding agencies often requires a PI or postdoc to obtain amazing results in a short period of time: as a result many desperate scientists opt for the via of research misconduct in order to sustain their academic careers while the honest scientists may see their careers lost
5. What is in question is the actual system: transparent, democratic and reasonable publication and funding policies are needed whatever the journal we choose to publish our works
Also funding should be transparent not judged by the brand of the journal but only by the quality of the original results (which should be make available to public) and by the quality of the proposals. So both peer review of papers and of funding applications should be public

So, if I am not mistaken I, as a taxpayer will be able to read science for free, but as an independent researcher (former academic who had to resign because of the lack of career perspective) I won’t be able to publish any longer because of the APCs applied by those OA journals… How do I get to increase my H-index to impress my dog?

Good question
I think everything goes through changing the current system as I mentioned before anything else
Journals whatever OA or traditional journals (in special the high impact ones) charge fortunes for publishing because they know there are desperate scientists trying to publish their research to survive
If journals and authors are obligated to submit original data and peer-review is public and if funding is decided in the quality of original work/of the proposal
there will be healthy competition between publishers in order to provide the best price/quality ratio

If scientific output funded by taxpayers need to be free, then why only publications? Why not stop patenting and go for open innovation? Why not give the state a share in every academic startup?
When it comes to profit-seeking as bad, then why not put checks on academic rent-seeking behavior at the cost of taxpayer money? Why not start audits for travel and expenditure claims of scientists to conferences where they fly for 16 hrs and present for 10 minutes? Why not check if such individual expenditure is actually higher or lower than the subscription fee for their subject area?

If these questions cannot be raised, then its clear people are looking for soft-targets to aim with their failed political leanings in the society.

Wildfowl provides also backgrounds about the funding (https://wildfowl.wwt.org.uk/index.php/wildfowl/about/journalSponsorship ). Revista Catalana d’Ornitologia is accepting papers in 3 languages (Catalan, Spanish and English). This journal offers a free service for English editing (‘The RCO provides a free service of English editing by a professional native speaker specialized in scientific publications in the accepted articles.’). Berkut is accepting papers in 4 languages (Ukrainian, Russian, English, German).

Note that almost all of these peer-reviewed and fully open access journals without APC don’t have an Impact Factor and that some of them also don’t have a DOI.

The Bulletin of the British Ornithologists’ Club ( http://boc-online.org/bulletin , see above) is an example of a society-owned journal which has recently switched from a subscription-based journal with hard copies to an open access online journal without hard copies and without an APC. The Bulletin of the British Ornithologists’ Club was also willing to publish in 2009 a thorough article on fraud (The Bartels and other egg collections from the island of Java, Indonesia, with corrections to earlier publications of A. Hoogerwerf, starts at page 18 at https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/182875 ).

For Business and Economics: Open Science does not seem to be a future for them any way. They sell reports at huge price and never publish any kind of data (raw or analyzed), because of business secrecy. Moreover, many science managers of EU council or Open Science Monitor or funding agencies are from field of business. So they will create OA Plan S, X, Z that will be never applied to themselves!
So there is no problem at all.

I do not know whether Plan S can lead to universal open access, but the open letter’s complaints surely seem misguided, especially the complaint about academic freedom. In short, you should not be free to give away your copyright to a publisher, for the same reason that you should not be free to work for less than the minimum wage. For more details, see my discussion of the open letter here: https://researchpracticesandtools.blogspot.com/2018/11/how-strong-are-objections-to-plan-s.html

Dear Dr Ribault, your call “Don’t complain, act!” combined with the description of how to act, namely to start up one’s own OA chemistry journal, is strange.
First of all, it is rather common and sometimes out of place to tell those who dare to protest against the power where others just follow, to stop complaining. in 1968, students were told to cut their hair and get a job. In academia, students who protest bullying or harassment are always told to buckle up, go back to the lab and produce some decent papers instead. You sure will appreciate that your suggestion was picked up by the person in power himself, Marc Schiltz.

“The open letter has hundreds of signatories. Surely one could find among them enough well-respected researchers for building the editorial board of a new open access, affordable, high quality, generalist chemistry journal.” https://t.co/vzSuJ0NobT

Your formulation is both disrespectful and sycophantic. Putting one’s name on a protest note against power is a brave step, especially in academia, and you ridicule it, applauded by the power itself.

Now to your practical suggestion. Smits, as you learned on my site, already set an example for such an OA journal to emulate: Frontiers in Chemistry.https://forbetterscience.com/2018/11/06/plan-s-protest-open-letter-signed-by-hundreds-of-scientists/#comment-23638
You yourself suggest joining PeerJ (APC ~€1k, the publisher is for-profit and owned by O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures), but I presume most of your peers will not agree with your assumption that PeerJ or Frontiers publish “high quality” only.
Now, how in your view should the Open Letter signatories compete with these commercial outlets? Thing is, there are no economically successful non-profit journals, certainly not where “high quality” is an editorial issue. I challenge you to name one example.
You cannot have both low APC and be choosy about what you publish. Full-time salaries need to get paid to ensure quality control and research integrity, where do you suggest these salaries should come from?
Now it is my turn to tell you what to do. Why don’t you ask Smits and Schiltz to fund non-profit free-to-publish OA journals and societies instead, acting for EU Commission and cOAlition S funders?
Or are you afraid to challenge authorities? Well, in this case, Frontiers always need loyal editors. Careful though, if your reject too much, you will be sacked.https://forbetterscience.com/2018/03/06/editor-sacked-over-rejection-rate-not-inline-with-frontiers-core-principles/

Dear Leonid, thanks for your reply. I would not want the authors of the open letter to shut up, as they bring valuable points to the debate. However, they did not just criticize: they also wrote that they were for open access, and suggested alternatives to Plan S, so it seemed fair to point out that they could themselves do something about it.

I do not know about Frontiers: I suggested only two OA publishers which I deem of high quality, PeerJ and SciPost. There are relatively few high quality OA publishers, how could it be otherwise, with so many hybrid journals around? The main question is not whether OA publishers are ‘economically successful’, but rather ‘scientifically successful’: surviving on institutional subsidies is OK (cf arXiv or SciPost). You can have low (or zero) APCs and be choosy, see for example Discrete Analysis https://discreteanalysisjournal.com/ . The trick is to have very low cost. Quality control does not necessitate full-time salaries: reviewers and editors are not paid, formatting is scientifically irrelevant and is in any case increasingly done by authors, you only need some hosting (cheap) and coding (cheap if you adapt an existing platform).

Surely Smits and Schiltz should fund APC-free OA journals, good suggestion for them. But the European authorities appear schizophrenic about open science, and are sometimes in league with big publishers : see the draft copyright directive, or this story: https://jscaux.org/blog/post/2018/04/02/ectender/ . This is why researchers had better take things in their own hands (as I was suggesting to the open letter’s signatories), stand up to both publishers and funders, and play the ones against the others when needed.

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